Posts by scrubber

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Re: freedom is nice to have, until it gets taken by a criminal who can not be found

> Surely that was better than the modern approach which seems to be shake the tree and see what falls out.

That wouldn't be the tree of liberty, would it? It seems to be in need of refreshment. (A bit like me).

btw. Here's a pro-tip for all you crims and terrorists out there - use online banking to communicate using small amounts of money as words or page.word amounts for a given reference book. The spooks won't be interfering with the security of online banking lest the banks lobby the govt. to take away the spooks' toys.

However, civil cases are much easier to prosecute, being based on balance of probabilities rather than beyond reasonable doubt, so many defences are less likely to be acceptable. But, assuming you're not uploading then the damages should be fairly small too.

Illegal content missing

Torrent sites should not host any of the data their users/members are sharing regardless of legality as it should be based on a P2P network where users share data themselves.

Uploaders are responsible for the legality/copyright of the material they upload in the jurisdiction they upload from.

Downloaders are only legally responsible when the whole file(s) is(are) downloaded and if they feel the material is potentially illegal OR copyright protected they should remove it forthwith from their machines and possibly inform the relevant authorities in the jurisdiction they download to.

Or you can assume that everyone on TPB knows the legal status of every file before they have downloaded it and treat them all as criminals.

Re: What the Lords is for

I hate the Lords, but...

I remember the Lords used to stop the reactionary government of the day doing some crazy knee jerk reaction to some temporary threat by screwing with the people's civil liberties, even when the public are temporarily in favour of it (e.g. Sarah's law).

Of course Blair was head of the Met and was involved in all kinds of controversies (no IPCC access to the de Menezes shooting, lobbied for holding people for 90 days without charge etc.)

Democratic oversight?

So, a supra-state unelected body (A) cannot perform oversight on a supra-state unelected body (B) because an unelected body (C) with limited oversight within a different state denies them access to B's internal documents.

Re: "Absolute" poverty

Not exactly Tim. Absolute poverty is based on an arbitrary dollar income that is judged to be insufficient to maintain a living standard that someone has decided constitutes poverty. That we currently include lack of basic requirements for survival is a political choice and should we ever get beyond people not being able to meet their basic needs the dollar value will increase to include refrigeration, or lighting, or internet access etc.

"Absolute" poverty

I know exactly what you're trying to say, but in economics poverty is definitionally a relative term, ergo we literally cannot raise people out of poverty, (Except by some strange finagling of the figures, but assuming any kind of Bell curve then no.)

Econ 101 - Fail

"All of those sums will eventually find their way back to consumers through their cell phone bills."

Sorry, but the costs of buying the bandwidth in a govt. auction are called sunk costs, and are fixed. Companies (want to) produce at profit maximising levels, i.e. where marginal cost = marginal revenue. Fixed costs play no part in determining where this level is and hence the amount the phone company pays has absolutely no bearing on the ultimate cost to the consumer.

Which isn't to say a company splurging their money on a license won't likely provide a worse service, money is in limited supply and money spent on licence means money not spent elsewhere (or given back to shareholders).

Re: Miniature iPhone about to launch, says Reuters

Mobile phones will be carried by corporate/state provided drones that watch over everything we do. It seems weird to us now to accept such intrusion but the added convenience of having your entire life recorded and available for upload to Facebook.gov is just too large to ignore. It also takes snippets of your conversations and posts them to twitter. As the algorithm only takes the most pithy or intelligent bits it makes you look great and have loads of followers and likes. You may recoil at the thought now, but that's because you're one of those luddite millenials.

Re: It is now racist to call someone a monkey?

Except he was referred to as acting as out of control as a monkey in a tropical forest, not as a monkey (never mind an ape) and may have been intended as racist or not, but there is no need for our media outlets to state it as fact that it was racist.

Re: @annihilator

Re: @annihilator

Plus the £22.5bn raised from 3G auctions that wouldn't have happened had we had a single state owned operator. And the many billions gained from the sale of BT. And the corporation tax from its profits.

Re: passenger density

I always think of this advert when I hear people complaining about the cattle trucks they endure to get to their sickness-inducing desks for the 9 hour (if you're lucky) grind to be able to afford their overpriced rent and £5 beers:

Pre-Crime

Extremist material

such as: Cameron shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Theft/Piracy

There is no copyright theft and definitely no piracy, there is only copyright infringement which is, or should be, a civil matter. By using taxpayer funds to investigate taxpayers and other companies the French government is subsidising large, multinational companies. I would have thought the French had more pressing matters to deal with than splurging cash to save companies paying lawyers going to court to protect their copyright, but what do I know...

UK based global policy?

"If revenge pornography were clearly illegal, they would, I am sure, ensure that such sites could not be promoted through their search engines."

So just because you make someone in the UK doing something illegal you want Google et al. to stop including sites in other countries where this is perfectly legal (like the UK currently) in their results?

Fine up until the last point...

"What happens to the one per cent is of course trivia"

Except the rich happen to run the political discourse that affects everyone: they write the laws and set the policies that the rest of us have to abide by. Their wealth alone is not important but the rules/barriers they put in place to maintain their, and their offspring's, wealth and political influence actively harm the rest of us.

Re: Human Nature

Well, I for one, am particularly grateful that we have someone as benevolent and wise as Robert Long 1 to tell us what can, and should, be tolerated in a tolerant society. There was me worrying that we might overstep the mark and stifle debate and curtail the presentation of ideas, new and old, but that was silly - we have ROBERT LONG 1 to tell us what we can and can't think, say, do and tolerate.

A reasonable compromise for socialists...

Would be for them to suggest central planning for the necessities: housing, food, medicine, clean water, heat/power.

I wouldn't want that, but the resources required to provide these things, and information required to attempt to provide them centrally, would be orders of magnitude less than trying to work out an average utility function for the country.

Or, worse yet, deciding what the 'correct' utility function is so that we have Opera Houses on every second street and no pubs.

Re: "collect" as in "collect" or Clapper-"collect"?

It's like that script I wrote at my bank that skims 0.1% off all transactions and puts it in my account. I only steal the money when I spend it.

Still, this was Google's argument in the first place when it claims it doesn't read your mail (because no human looks at it) but simply has a computer scan it to serve up ads relevant to the content of your mail. Unintended consequences of, and for, the "do no evil" company.

@streaky

They take away your IT equipment for 'forensic analysis' - hey, you might be downloading child terrorism copyright infringement porn - and if that's your main tool for work you're screwed. They keep/destroy your equipment, you can't earn, so lose your house. Once you're destitute they drop all charges and everything's hunky dory, no misconduct, nothing to see here, move along.